Trend Micro introduces new Canadian leader, new strategy

It’s busy times for security vendor Trend Micro Canada, as the company has introduced a new country leader at the same time as unveiling its new corporate strategy.

Trend has appointed Jim Short, formerly of CA Technologies, Telus, Entrust and Exocom, as its new vice president and general manager for Canada. Short said his time and experience in the channel – including time as channel manager at Apple Canada and on the solution provider side with Exocom – will serve him well in his new role.

“I believe in a missionary sales force from the manufacturer that works with customers to provide partners air cover, but works with partners to flesh out the full solution for our customers,” Short said. “I see that as a very big part of our strategy going forward.”

To Short, the biggest opportunities for Trend and its partners come in the form of three “-izations” – consumerization, virtualization and optimization.

And those three fields fit nicely into the new overall strategy and approach recently unveiled by Trend worldwide. The strategy seeks to redefine Trend as a leader in the race to the cloud for security, and to provide better protection in the “post-PC era” where it can’t be assumed that most or all computing is being done on a familiar, Windows-based desktop.

“You have to have protection that follows the data, no matter where it’s accessed, when it’s accessed or on what device,” said Ian Gordon, marketing and channel chief at Trend Micro Canada.

The centerpiece of the strategy is Trend’s Smart Protection Network, it’s cloud-based repository of security information. Since it came online in 2008, the company says it has seen 70 billion daily queries from more than 130 million users, and will serve as the way security information gets collected and updated protection disseminated.

At the same time as that force could be seen as a more centralized approach to security, with local definitions being subservient to the cloud-based master list, Trend is also eyeing decentralized, particularly around data leakage prevention, Gordon said.

“DLP has been done centrally, but now we’re building it into chunks of technology on end devices themselves,” he said.

It’s part of a move away from the old model of “a hard outer shell that’s soft on the inside,” the old paradigm of corporate security that needs to be re-thought in light of the move towards concepts like consumerization of IT and bring your own device.

“When people are using their personal devices to access corporate data, [centralized security] is not enough,” Gordon said.

A lot of pieces for the new strategy are already well represented in the Trend Micro product line, he said, and partners should expect to see more functionality in the products Trend offers today, as well as come new offerings.

“We’re going to be adding incremental pieces to it, we’re going to build out our vision of having more sensors in the private network,” he said. “It’s not a revolutionary change for partners, but it is a different way for them to talk to their customers about security technology as an enabler of they want to do, rather than something that stops them from doing their jobs.”

Short concurred that the move towards the consumerization of IT could provide to be quite the enabler for the IT department, and thus for solution providers.

“You can get what you want, and you’ve got the potential to take $3,000 per desktop out of the budget as well,” with the BYOD approach, he suggested.

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Robert Dutt

Robert Dutt is the founder and head blogger at ChannelBuzz.ca. He has been covering the Canadian solution provider channel community for a variety of publications and Web sites since 1997. View all posts by Robert Dutt →